Autonomous activism and the global justice movement

Abstract

In constructing new ways of engaging with society and new visions of how society might be, social activists need to negotiate numerous social, political, philosophical and personal contradictions and tensions. Utilizing data from a discourse analysis conducted on web-based texts, this article focuses on three such tensions experienced by autonomous activists: autonomy versus collective, operationalization versus institutionalization and evasion of versus subjection to mainstream authorities. We examine how autonomous activists negotiate these tensions and argue that the way in which they ‘live with the tensions’ can be theorized using Lash and Urry’s concept of ‘aesthetic reflexivity’. This particular form of reflexivity augments cognitive and emotional reflexivity within autonomous activism, and provides further insight into how autonomous activists succeed in reconstituting their practice in ways that reaffirm their principles.